A scaffolding of bare metal bars runs the length of the room. Twenty dresses hang in single file along its sides. Visitors are pushed onto the runway and made to walk between the clothes, which now stand in for the seated audience. The format of a fashion show is inverted at Pier 36, and the garments do the looking.
The installation is the centrepiece of the seventeenth edition of Independent, the New York art fair Elizabeth Dee founded as a corrective to the conventional format. Dee grew up in the rural Midwest reading fashion magazines. She has said, on the record, that she knew about Comme des Garçons before she knew about Donald Judd. The fair this year, the largest she has ever staged with seventy-six galleries, opens with twenty dresses pulled from the past decade of the Parisian house.
The scaffold
The structure was designed by Rei Kawakubo herself. Industrial poles. Right angles. No ornament. The dresses are clipped to the bars in the manner of a backstage rail, and the visitor walks between them, the way a buyer might walk between mannequins at a sample sale. The performative dynamic between subject and viewer flips. The dresses are the seated guests now, and the audience is the runway.
The selection was made by Adrian Joffe, the brand's chief executive, and by Dee. They chose pieces that work as sculpture and as performance. A black and white ensemble from A/W 2020 distorts the body into a soft drop-like form, the palette borrowed from the Pagliacci clown of Italian opera. A S/S 2024 dress carries Rococo portraits across its surface, with two enormous blue bows at the hips. A piece from the most recent S/S collection produces bulbous red splashes across the form, like a body wrapped in a quiet explosion.
What hangs on the scaffold is not the easy retrospective. There are no greatest hits. The Body Meets Dress collection of 1997 is nowhere in sight. Instead the curators have stayed inside the last ten years, the period of Comme des Garçons that the New York audience has not seen properly framed since the Met Costume Institute's 2017 exhibition.
The fair
Independent occupies Pier 36 on the Lower East Side, in a space designed by SO-IL, with the overall fair architecture by Diogo Passarinho. Visitors enter through a thick curtain of yellow rubber strips, which establishes the tone before any artwork is seen. Solo presentations make up the bulk of the booths. The mix is heavy on emerging galleries and balanced with a thin layer of blue-chip names.
Dee describes herself as not particularly a fan of art fairs, and built Independent as the platform she could not find elsewhere. The closest analogue she offers is not another fair but Dover Street Market, the retail concept that Joffe and Kawakubo opened in London in 2004 and now run in seven cities. Curated. Tightly edited. Built around an editorial point of view rather than commerce alone.
If Independent could be the Dover Street Market for art fairs, that would be a huge success.
Margaux DelacroixWhat lasts
The Comme des Garçons partnership at Pier 36 follows the house's collaboration with the Dia Art Foundation and the New York sculptor Meg Webster on a pyramid-shaped glass perfume bottle. Both projects sit inside the art world rather than the fashion calendar. Kawakubo has spent fifty-seven years designing clothes that ask to be read as sculpture, and the city of New York is, for a few days at Pier 36, treating them that way.
Comme des Garçons inside Rei Kawakubo's scaffolding, Pier 36. Photography by Andy Romer.
The Independent runs at Pier 36, 299 South Street, until 17 May 2026. The Comme des Garçons installation closes with it. A book has not been announced. The pieces, after the fair, return to the archive in Paris.